Has mindless munching got the best of you? Are you one of those women with a fridge full of nothing but film? Or is it that you simply have too much on your plate? Whatever your eating style, our genius food expert teases, tricks, and makes over your diet without ever making you feel deprived.

By Sarah Wildman

Photo: Geof Kern

Jo Piazza is a party girl, and anyone who reads her New York Daily News gossip column knows it. In Full Disclosure, she dishes about the boldfaced names that make up Manhattan's nightlife, which means she has to go out—a lot, as in two to three evenings a week, working the red carpet circuit of movie premieres, TV show launches, and fashion galas. Dinner often comes in a wineglass with whatever finger foods float by.

Wansink is the John S. Dyson professor of marketing at Cornell University and author of Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think. He is also a nontraditionalist when it comes to diet. Through ongoing research at his Food and Brand Lab, he's found that a number of surprising factors, having more to do with perception than taste, influence our decision to take a bite (or sip): Fancy wine labels, for instance, entice us to drink more, big plates make us eat more, and exotic descriptions on menus coax us to order dessert. Based on such information, Wansink has developed a series of simple tricks to help people change unhealthy eating patterns. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, impressed by his unique approach to food, appointed him executive director of its Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion (CNPP). Now he's overseeing the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans and new additions to MyPyramid, an interactive nutrition program. For our makeovers, O asked Wansink to share his insights into which cues might be prompting our subjects to eat poorly and to recommend the kinds of switches that could encourage behavioral shifts.

After agreeing to participate, each woman opened her door to the food makeover team—Wansink, Jackie Haven (a registered dietitian and director of nutrition marketing and communications at the CNPP), and me, a fly on the wall with a tape recorder. Wansink would start our visits by explaining, "There are five major diet danger zones: meal stuffing, snack grazing, party bingeing, restaurant indulging, and desk or dashboard dining." The subjects would nod in recognition. "Make three small changes in a problem area," he promised, "and you'll jump-start the rest of your life without even knowing it." All four of our volunteers were eager to try.